This Week’s Feature: Passion Setting 20th Century Style

It’s Holy Week and Miss Mussel’s masters thesis was on 20th century setting of the Passion with particular emphasis on the Passion 2000 Project involving Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, Wolfgang Rihm and Sofia Gubaidulina. As such, each day this week will be devoted to a different aspect of Passion setting.Today’s episode is history-related, with the following installments revolving around one of the pieces from the 2000 Project.

The whole essay is available here if you’ve got a hankering or have trouble waiting till Friday to see how it all ends.

Incidentally, the idea for this thesis came about because of a random album purchase. Miss Mussel was perusing her local classical music shop the year before and discovered Tan Dun’s Water Passion. She had never really heard Bach’s versions and didn’t know much about Passion setting at all. If she were to be completely honest, she would admit that it was the cover art that sold her. In the liner notes there was information on the rest of the Project and the rest, as they say, was history.